Young V&A celebrated this year’s London Design Festival by inviting designers Max Lamb, Studiomama and U-Build back to celebrate the exciting projects that have taken place over the last year and explore how inclusivity and play is fundamental to the design process. We welcomed families for a day packed with workshops and activations giving visitors an opportunity to see how Young V&A collaborates with designers and our audiences to co-create meaningful learning experiences and co-designed outputs.
From Launching our Tactile Stools and delving into playful design processes in our Sensory Design workshop to building architectural structures and creating objects to treasure with waste. With over 1500 people attending the festival activities over the day Young V&A was bustling with energy, ideas and collaboration, a free space where families could use their imaginations to play, experiment and design.
A third of Young V&A’s free permanent galleries is dedicated to design, it showcases the diversity of disciplines in historical and contemporary design found in an ever-changing landscape. For children and young people this is often their first understanding of design, here they can learn the power it holds to create real and tangible differences for themselves and others in the future. At Young V&A we want to ensure that children and young people the designers of tomorrow, are part of the design discourse of today.
Tactile Stools by Max Lamb
Kicking off the festival Young V&A launched a set of Tactile Stools created by experimental designer Max Lamb. The four stools, each made from a different core material, offer a sensory hands-on experience allowing visitors to engage with making processes. We worked closely with the Together Space based in North-East London to inspire four stools.
Sensory Design workshop
Alongside in Open Studio we ran our Sensory Design workshop made specifically for children and young people with sensory differences and additional needs and their families. This workshop was developed alongside the Tactility Project offering an opportunity to delve into our materials library for open-ended exploration that focussed on the senses. This process inspired Max Lamb’s Tactile Stools and was developed with families from The together space.
SRM Children’s Chair
Visitors also had the chance to meet designer Max Lamb, to learn about our collaboration and to discover how he created a new flat-pack SRM children’s chair made from recycled plastic toys, cars and racetracks. Visitors were able to assemble and disassemble the chairs, giving them insight into design choices around materials processes and form.
Play-Folly
We were keen to bring back U-Build after they worked with 11-14-year olds during Summer Design Club, Co-designing and building an architectural installation for families to play, explore and relax in. For London Design festival with gave families the opportunity use the modular U-Build boxes to create an evolving Play-Folly which was constructed by families visiting on the day and opened to all in the afternoon to play and explore.
Cardboard Creations with Studiomama
We were very excited to invite Studiomama back to Young V&A, their pallet furniture exhibited in the ’Design Gallery’ is an example of Open Source Design and how with a bit of resourcefulness you can create anything from waste. Visitors had the chance to delve into Studiomama’s process and explore the creative possibilities of cardboard with designers Nina Tolstrup and Jack Mama, transforming this everyday material into large scale masks and costumes during a Carboard Creations workshop.
You can still see and experience the stools designed by Max Lamb in The Factory in the Design Gallery. If you would like to participate in a future Sensory Design Workshops please look online or book out a Sensory Design bag anytime.
Thanks for sharing this wonderful story of inspiring activities – it gives me hope! Please add the external link to Tactility Project that’s missing above.
Looks amazing !!!!